11/15/2007 @ 6:00PM

Goat People

The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese by Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz ($23, Lions Press, 2007).

Somehow, the humble goat manages to duplicate the qualities of a fine wine. Sophisticates prize goats for their exotic cheeses. Urbanites with romantic notions of farm living like them for their grizzled features, gamey scents and because they’re not large, flatulent cows that would turn a New England farm fantasy into an Oklahoma ranch.

Farming involves manure and early mornings, frantic calls to the vet, money, sore muscles and often the death of an animal who sits somewhere between pet and employee. It’s not an easy life. Making cheese, though it has its rewards, is sometimes gross.

Margaret Hathaway and her husband Karl Schatz chronicled their revelatory journey into all things goat in The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese, written by Hathaway and photographed by Schatz.

In 2003, the couple were the picture of urban contentment: They lived in the picturesque Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. She worked as a manager at Magnolia Bakery, the place that made the cupcake hip again. He edited photographs for Time.com.

One day while riding the subway, Hathaway noticed herself surrounded by surly passengers in a metal tube stained by “slick iced grime.” After a weekend in the country, working on a cookbook with her boss, Hathaway came “back to the city with a dream of the country.”

She shared her dream with Schatz, and the two hatched a plan to flee New York and become goat farmers. The plan quickly morphed into an obsession. They longed not only for a simpler life but for one in which they could exert some control over the food they ate. After listening to Schatz ramble on and on about “the goat saga–its wild speculations, curious revelations, crashing defeats,” his therapist finally advised the couple to “take a year to explore the goat world … have adventures, take photographs, record our thoughts and at the end, if we made it, we could decide whether devoting our lives to agriculture was really the answer.”

And so they gave up their apartment, packed up all of their worldly goods, and as two pilgrims and a dog, visited farms around the country where they saw goats slaughtered for the end of Ramadan, ate pounds and pounds of cabrito (goat meat), watched goat chariot races, attended conventions, explored the Curse of the Billy Goat and hiked with goats as pack animals.

Hathaway and Schatz’s goat odyssey might be a little extreme (and Hathaway does wax on a bit long about cheese), but the oddest observation in this charming and uplifting tale is that Hathaway and Schatz aren’t alone.

Though goat is not quite the staple meat in America that it is in Africa and Central and South America, they do inspire devotion from specialty farmers, especially those who are interested in organic farming. That goats will eat garbage, fabric, weeds and even metal is well known. But only the goat-savvy know that this means goats can be used for land reclamation. Cattle can empty a pasture of wild grasses, allowing weeds to take root, take over and cause erosion. Goats will clear those weeds away and give the wild grass another chance.

Hathaway and Schatz treat goats and farms like oenophiles treat grapes and vineyards. Like wine, the flavor of a goat’s cheese is entirely dependent on terroir, what the goat eats and during which season. The taste of their milk will change from place to place and herd to herd, allowing for a cornucopia of goat’s milk cheeses to be made all over the world.

Hathaway and Schatz end their journey on their own farm. The goats are in pens, but their owners are free.